I first took a css courses to get the basics then didn’t do much with it, then tailwind came out. I had used bootstrap, but always struggled to get stuff to look nice. I’m not doing web dev most of the time. So it was much easier to memorize tailwind utility classes than css. These days with ui frameworks like daisy, shadcn, tailwind is pretty easy for doing something simple for an IT dev tool but still customize it.
For creativity, I wished I had the time to get really good with css. It really seems to have grown a lot. Using sveltekit, its really easy to get component scoped css
One of my favorite features with zed is the really nice keyboard and window management shortcuts. I can have my terminal just be another tab, easily switch between em and the file explorer
But to the authors note, one might find a single behavior in zed really annoying. Mine is how zed appends a new line at the end of files on save. Used to be able to disable this in settings but an update broke that long ago. Maybe some can tell me its fixed but seems like I’ll need to journey down git hub issue fix but did not find one while back.
I deleted my facebook. Its the only thing I can do it seems and I advice everyone to do the same. Screw this platform. Facebook’s scams have caused the elders in my family so much pain and me so much stress dealing with it, its not worth it. A monopolistic cancer on society.
Are people still using Facebook in 2026? I sometimes go back to my Facebook account, it is a complete wasteland, my feed is just generic doomscroll material, nothing new from actual people I know. Communities I follow mostly moved to Discord, it is also no longer where events like festivals post their latest news. Facebook looks like it is #1 on paper, but my experience is completely different, it is nothing like it was 10 years ago, in fact, a significant portion of my Facebook feed is "remember 5-10 years ago".
Some of the best B2C customers are on FB — willing to spend, low expectations, low maintenance.
If you add IG to the mix, it’s even better.
Your typical HNer does not really fall into “ideal customer” profile for most B2C businesses. Our saving grace is our above average income profile. Other than that, on average we are tolerated rather than sought after (imho).
Facebook marketplace has completely taken over the used sales business in my area (Pacific Northwest). Craigslist is dead, offer up is dead, FB marketplace won.
is this still really the case? I feel like Facebook Marketplace has been significantly more dead than even last year. and it definitely seems completely dead for things like rental listings.
It is huge around Seattle. Nothing else exists for selling goods. There are also private sales groups on FB as well for specialized interests, including illicit home meal delivery services. It seemed like shef.com was going to enter that space and win it but they seemingly abandoned parts of it and pivoted primarily towards weekly Indian meals. Sad, they used to have some amazing West African food.
It's become a defacto forum for a lot of local niche stuff like clubs, schools, non profits, and other special interest groups.
In my area there are groups related to a lot of different outdoor activities , and they share information, trip reports, etc. There might be some other forums for that, but they aren't as widely used or frequently updated.
I might look at my feed* perhaps 2-3 times a week; despite this, there's a good chance only one of my friends has posted anything new. Unfortunately, that particular friend is also a fairly cliché left-of-the-Cuban-Communist-Party (no, seriously) activist and 95% of her posts are "signal boosting" things I, a Brit living in Germany, do not have any connection to, e.g. "Demexit memes" or Bernie Sander's opinions about anything.
Doesn't help that this trillion dollar corporation still can't handle rotation metadata*, so if I see something and I want to share it, even if it's a good fit for my feed, 50% chance the pic looks stupid the moment I've uploaded it, to which I respond "ugh, never mind then" and forget about trying to solve this and don't post it.
You're right. But there's a generational aspect to this too.
Younger generations won't touch Facebook. It's seen as a platform for "old" people. So Facebook is on a modest decline. (Enter Instagram and Tiktok and all that to fill the void...)
I purposely don't use mine. They keep shadow profiles on you, if you're in IL you can sue them (there already was a lawsuit about it) and get some money from them.
I completely agree. I did this many years ago. The only thing that annoys me is that for many local things it’s the only option. I’m actually significantly less informed and involved in the local community because things are so heavily reliant on Facebook, and I refuse to sign back up.
I left Facebook over a decade ago, and it was painful to realize how many people simply forgot that I exist, and how many events I missed because many people exclusively use it to invite people.
Similar experience where I met someone in 2017 and was enraptured with them, and we eventually drifted apart because they only communicated through Snapchat and Instagram.
I often wonder if abstaining from the platforms that I dislike was worth the increase in loneliness and detachment from society, but I don't have access to the alternative universe where I decided to grit my teeth and accept the data hoarding companies and dark patterns as a tradeoff for being able to interact with people who couldn't care less about the technicalities.
I think, if someone refuses to interact with you unless it's over their preferred corporate advertising-delivery platform, then they really aren't your friend. Real friends are willing to put in effort and at least agree on a least common denominator communication channel!
My friends know I am not on Facebook. If they really want me to invite me to an event, they know how to reach me, and they do. Anything being communicated out only on Facebook, I just don't go to, and I probably wouldn't want to go to it anyway.
I've been off of Facebook for so long, I don't even remember when I quit. At least 10 years ago, probably 15. And I never joined Instagram, TikTok, or any of these other ad-delivery platforms. I don't feel that I am any more lonely or more detached from society because of it.
it is how it is, but nothing's stopping any of us from reaching out or calling a friend or sending a calendar invite. I used Facebook for a local animal shelter I was volunteering at, but from the infinite scroll filled with infinite ads, very little local things in the middle using "FB Purity" firefox addon to hide all the garbage you see how much garbage is actually there. it feels like I pulled away from a dark matrix of things designed to keep us hooked, then I look around and see everybody else hooked, commenting with bots, sharing facebook encouraging memes/new age spirituality posts and fb doing all it could to hook everybody's attention, getting riled up against political opinions, bots.
is the loneliness worth it? probably not. is the freedom? yes.
> where I decided to grit my teeth and accept the data hoarding companies and dark patterns as a tradeoff for being able to interact with people who couldn't care less about the technicalities.
I know, right? that infinite scroll/showing all the good things on the timelines isn't their real life, they're filling a void within themselves surfing short videos and voicing opinions on nearly everything.
even Zuckerberg said Facebook isn't for making/interacting with friends anymore, it's other things, and not good things.
you're not alone, and you're not detached from society, you're just unplugged from the matrix. of course I say this while browsing subreddits and hn, but hobbies and activities where we meet people, these are always going to be the best thing available to us. in the digital world there's plenty of people who'd be down for a LAN, a hangout, an event like going hiking, and I've met some cool people outside of social media but there's many days where it was me, 4 walls, a book/finding things to occupy my time.
They globally reset the privacy settings for pretty entertaining reasons. Every few years a post goes around saying crazy privacy things that gives you instructions to change your privacy settings to only “share with yourself”. If you’re dumb enough to do it, you basically shadow-ban yourself. If enough people do it, they have to change the settings back because also those same people will complain about their aunt/neighbor/dad/sister whatever not being able to see their posts and have no idea why.
I searched for a used steamdeck in my area and got 100% fraud sellers. My elders in my family fall for fraud via meta’s platforms. Its caused me lots of stress and pain.
The only thing I can do is delete all my Meta accounts. One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership.
If this was my product, I’d feel ashamed by how trash it is. I really hope governments force stricter regulations on meta and ads in general. Meta should be liable if a user is scammed by an ad on their platform. Plane and simple.
>One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership.
The rank and file are complicit. There are people commenting on HN every day who are paid handsomely to work at Meta and to act willfully blind to the awful ethics their company has displayed for two decades.
The 1972 Knapp Commission into police corruption introduced some really great vocabulary to express "the rank and file are complicit".
"Meat eaters" and "grass eaters".
The meat eaters were the officers that actively pursued opportunities to be corrupt and spent a great deal of time on the job engaging in corrupt activities instead of police work. The grass eaters were essentially normal officers who would turn a blind eye or do things that had been normalized such as accepting or soliciting small bribes opportunistically.
In the words of the report, "the grass eaters are the heart of the problem".
> One of the riches companies in the world with some very smart people and its ruined by toxic leadership.
Leadership can certainly be blamed, but I think it comes down to their hiring practices. When you prioritise leetcode-isk wrote memorisation and deprioritise intrinsics (like ethics, shocker), you end up with a company full of people who are willing to do anything to achieve their singular goal of making TC go up. Morality or product quality be damned.
I think there's certainly some blame that falls on the engineers at Facebook. But, in my experience, if you put any number of developers in a room, noone is going to come up with "let's help scam the elderly". That requires an MBA or two.
Nah, engineers like to solve problems. The silicon valley jerk ratio scene doesn't come out of nowhere. You can get engineers to work on solving just about any problem if you make it interesting enough to them.
I’ve been using a travel router with a battery last few years, so if I get internet on a plane, all of our devices get online access vs just one single phone.
I’ve recently had to deal with my father cognitive decline & falling for scams left & right using Meta’s apps. This has been so hard on our family. I did a search the other day on marketplace and 100% of all sellers were scams, 20-30 of them.
Meta is a cancer on our society, I’m shutting down all my accounts. Back when TV/Radio/News paper were how you consumed news, you couldn’t get scams this bad at this scale. Our parents dealt with their parents so much easier as they cognitively declined. We need legal protections for elders and youth online more than ever. Companies need to be liable for their ads and scam accounts. Then you’d see a better internet.
My grandmother has been through the same thing. She was scammed out of all of her savings by accounts impersonating a particular celebrity. Thankfully the bank returned all of the money, but the perpetrators will never be caught, they operate out of Nigeria (one of them attached their phone to her Google account.)
Unfortunately these fake celebrity accounts are swarming her like locusts again. We tried to educate her about not using her real name online, not giving out information or adding unknown people as friends, but there's a very sad possibility that she doesn't fully understand what she's doing.
It was emotionally difficult going through her laptop to gather evidence for the bank. They know exactly how to romance and pull on heart strings, particularly with elderly people.
Meta's platforms are a hive of scammers and they should be held accountable.
The number of my outer circle of friends who fall for the “copied profile” adding of unknown people or accept a friend request from the attractive young woman who somehow is interested in them is shocking. (I’m gauging this from looking at the “mutual friends” in the friend request.)
I'm curious why it seems so many on this site still have Facebook accounts. I'd deleted mine before and it didn't stick, but I deleted it again earlier this year and haven't one single time considered creating another. I see no reason I would need a Facebook account again. I don't care to follow the activity of acquaintances.
Unless you're talking about Instagram? Even then IG has always struck me as the cooler Facebook, but now it's just a doom scrolling machine from what I can tell.
I presume I'm in the minority. But I don't really understand it. I see no need for these services anymore; they seem mostly like Trojan horses to inject advertisements into our lives.
Why can’t you do a power of attorney(?) over her finances or move them into a living trust, etc. seems like there are legal protections out there if you can convince her it’s in her best interest to let her family manage her estate so she can focus on enjoying final years (obviously don’t say it like that)
I don’t think it’s a silent crisis per se, but just one people ignore.
There’s tons of media about it, tons of people are aware of elder fraud etc but people don’t want to think about the vulnerable of society. There’s been jokes about it and media about it going back decades.
People are aware but solving it requires an uncomfortable level of change in society, training and regulations.
As an aside, both Thelma and The Beekeeper are recent movies about elders being scammed and revenge being taken. Both very different but enjoyable.
People survived with quite severe dementia hundreds of years ago. It doesn’t necessarily imply the rest of the body is unhealthy just their brain in a very specific way.
Children who are not cognitively and emotionally ready for the Internet shouldn't have access to it. Similarly, any elderly folks who are not cognitively able to deal with social media (or the Internet in general) should be cut off from it, too.
You can (and should) have That Talk with your parents about scams on the internet, but if they're still falling for them and not getting the message, maybe it's time to gently steer them off the Internet. We take the car keys away from people who can't handle driving anymore.
Unfortunately I have a similar experience. If someone's working at Meta right now, and has been in the past 10 years, they're willingly and actively contributing to making society worse. Some open-source tech is not going to undo any of this, nor any of the past transgressions. I get the pay is probably great, but have some decency.
I suggested a hiring ban on anyone who ever worked at Meta some years back. It was not met with open arms. Going to try again here...
I think it's a valid suggestion that might result in people rethinking working for Meta if it was taken seriously.
Working for Meta is ethically questionable. The company does unspeakable damage to our country. It harms our kids, our elders, our political stability. Working for it, and a number of similar companies, is contributing to the breakdown of the fabric of our society.
Why not build a list of Meta employees and tell them they're not eligible for being hired unless they show some kind of remorse or restitution?
It could be an aggregation of LinkedIn profiles and would call attention to the quandary of hiring someone with questionable ethics to work at your organization. It might go viral on the audacity of the idea alone. That might cause some panic and some pause amongst prospective Meta hires and interns. They might rethink their career choices.
What about Meta AI? For reasons I cannot comprehend they have been releasing quality research for free for years like PyTorch, FastText vectors, and the LLaMa models.
I don't know how to reconcile the one side of the company that should be burnt to the ground and the one that's pushing local models forward, but I'd say it's worth considering.
At FAANG, open source is de rigeur for things you can’t make money off of, either because it’s an ecosystem play or someone asked their boss.
You’d be surprised how little drama there is around this.
I’d note that the department that made open LLMs hasn’t produced any work since they produced a Gemini 2.5 Flash equivalent with much better tool calling, because the God King threw a fit. Without reasoning. And they had a reasoning model on deck that was cancelled too.
My litmus test is, do you think that the person managing Meta’s coffee supply is ethically questionable? If you met them, would you tell them that they need to quit, and would you consider them a bad person if they don’t? There are organizations that meet that bar, but I really don’t think Meta is one of them.
Surely there are employees at Meta who are not making the world a worse place. There may even be people in technical roles who are not. I can imagine Meta probably has some kind of ethics or privacy department (what a demoralizing place to do that kind of work!) who are even trying against the tide to do good! You can't just use "worked at Meta" as the filter. I'd want to know exactly what they worked on, and have them explain their ethical rationale for continuing.
>I’d want to know exactly what they worked on, and have them explain their ethical rationale for continuing.
Now I’m imagining I meet someone who is on the other side of the interview table having these thoughts. Are my capabilities ignored because they are already prejudiced to a decision I made years prior? What if my answer, trying to improve issues from within, is not good enough?
I guess this is just a risk that you have to accept when you decide to work somewhere like Meta. I wouldn't accept a job at Philip Morris for the same reason.
It's a risk you have to accept when you work anywhere, I suppose. There are plenty of people across the industry who will judge you based on stereotypes of where you've worked in the past and what they think that implies about you.
Personally, I think that's a bad hiring practice, deterministically leading to worse employees and a more toxic culture. But I know that people who engage in it generally have some argument for why they can't or shouldn't impartially evaluate every interview.
add the three-letter agencies, Surveillance firms, Palantir, military industrial complex and many more to the list. blacklisting people who worked for Meta seems so performative...
One must also check what YouTube recommends their elderly parents, because it is easy for them to slide into getting recommended harmful content, mostly things like psychological, religious or alternative-medicine topics. Note that not all of them are harmful, but most of them are published by very odd channels.
Opening YouTube on a new machine / OS / browser / without login is eye opening in terms of the awful stuff that gets recommended by default and how quickly it tilts worse if you watch any of it.
I just did this on Youtube for the first time in a while, and it won't show me videos unless I start watching things first, unless I go to Shorts, where I am presented with an infinite scroll of what appears to be deeply unsettling and uncanny short AI generated engagement bait videos.
Re: AI
I've noticed on YT there are some informercial level ads that are super obvious AI voice overs where it feels like they straight up lifted another ad and put their own dialog on top of it
Every time I open YouTube in incognito mode, depending on the region I'm in, I get recommended either far-right content, Bitcoin grifters, Israel shills, nauseating YouTube vitality factories or straight up Jihadist/Hindutva/Christian-right content.
This, so much! It's outright disgusting. I have no idea why we tolerate this as a society. I fear it is because this diagnosis isn't widely known, it's happening on the fringes.
Everybody, including journalists and tech people, is moving about their own algorithmic bubble nearly all the time. They just can't imagine how bad the situation has become out there. We're turning a blind eye to the very thing that is destroying our societies.
I think that any of these algorithmic feeds, by any company, should be held as if the companies have vetted the content and it is theirs. And the culpability that goes with that.
> should be held as if the companies have vetted the content and it is theirs.
It's not "as if" it "is". There is a scant difference between an LLM and a recommendation algorithm picking what to "say" out of what, 100 billion or more messages? Because the pool to choose from is so enormous, speech becomes not what one person typed but what one algorithm plucked out of the haystack to show, to influence, and to manipulate for financial gain.
That’s dishonest. Ivermectin is widely prescribed to people too. That’s like calling Ibuprofen a horse anti-inflammatory drug. That doesn’t mean it was an effective covid treatment though. The information from the third world that made it appear like it was seems to have been that it was treating preexisting parasites in covid patients, eliminating a comorbidity and thereby improving covid survival rates. But undiagnosed parasites are rare in the US, so that wouldn’t have worked here.
youtube also has kitboga, pirogi, deeveeaar, etc which are very helpful. i introduced my mother, who has early dementia and can't do much, so watches a lot of netflix and youtube, to kitboga and she loved it and found other scambaiters. i'm stoked. i know she will tell a scammer to f off now.
In case anyone needs to help a relative without a Google account block YouTube channels or videos, the subreddit for uBlock Origin has a wiki that can help. You can block videos by channel or video title or URL using CSS rules. Removing the clickbait and watching a few videos of decent content with them helps a lot.
Have you seen some of the ads between the videos? There are some shady get rich quick types of influencers selling stuff that might really set them back financially as well.
One third of all scams in the US are operated on Meta platforms.
They have a policy that if a scammer’s ad spend makes up more than 0.15% of Meta revenue, moderators must protect the scammer instead of blocking it.
Meta is working hard to scam your dad for ad spend. It’s hugely profitable for them and they are helping to grow it per internal policy. They are only interested in fostering big-time scammers.
I would like to understand the downvotes: is it from doubting these facts? If so, I will post the sources (which were recent mainstream news on the front page of HN). Or is it because of the negative sentiment about Meta? Or disagreement that Meta has any responsibility over moderating scams they promote?
These are verified facts that make up the substance of my message:
- Meta protects their biggest scammers, per internal policy from leadership
- Meta makes a huge profit from these scammers (10% of total revenue; or in other words, their scam revenue is approximately 5x larger than the total Oculus revenue)
- The scams that Meta promotes represent one-third of the total online scams in the US
> I would like to understand the downvotes: is it from doubting these facts? If so, I will post the sources (which were recent mainstream news on the front page of HN). Or is it because of the negative sentiment about Meta? Or disagreement that Meta has any responsibility over moderating scams they promote?
It may be as simple as "there are a lot of Meta employees browsing HN."
I don’t but there was national news about this policy some days ago - they must exist because of the enormous volume (one third of all scams in US not to mention abroad) and the fact that they created this policy for a reason. Meta is a criminal empire
> One third of all scams in the US are operated on Meta platforms.
And 100% of all internet scam traffic in the US goes through either US ISPs or US cell carriers.
Should those entities be held liable instead? Or maybe, Meta instead should scan users' private messages on their platforms and report everything that might seem problematic (whatever the current US administration in power considers as problematic) to the relevant authorities?
My personal take: there should be more effort in going after the actual scammers, as opposed to going after the "data pipes" (of various abstraction levels) like Meta/ISPs/cell carriers/etc.
So many of us have been there - it is brutal. These platforms are ripping us apart from each other, providing criminals easy access to the most vulnerable, and concentrating wealth to an unimaginable degree.
My dad had fallen for two scams - one through WhatsApp, the other texts.
I’m not sure how much we can blame individual companies for this. Obviously they should be doing more - shutting down accounts that message people at random, for instance, but I feel like the scammers will find a way.
I also don’t know what else we can do. It should be easier for kids (or anyone else) to shut down their parent’s accounts at least once this happens, stop all wire and crypto transfers, etc.
I don't mean to be rude or anything - and I don't disagree with what you're suggesting - but don't you think at some point you have a responsibility to stop them accessing these platforms yourself?
Our own attempts to do something about (successful) scammers were meant with utter indifference by my parent's state's (Arizona) attorney general, county sheriffs, local police.
I wished I could get someone passionate on my team who wants to learn n grow. I’m at a FAANG company. I’m a self taught idiot with no college, but a lot of being in the right place, the right attitude and willing to grind to fill in my missing gaps. I’m top performer on my team, but I don’t think I’d make it today though starting at the bottom. I know I’d have a hard time getting a new job today for sure.
I recall guitar center is still on a green screen back when I worked there in my youth. It was pretty fun learning that interface, fancy keyboard shortcuts etc.
Zed has really good vim bindings + mix of native shortcuts making a powerful workflow. The window management keyboard shortcuts are great and is the main reason I switched from some vscode use. Its kind of what I wanted neovim + tmux to be with less work and setup.
Zed doesn’t have file delete undo and I found the AI autocomplete to be so bad I had to turn it off. I still use vscode for work. Zed is kind of in a purgatory state where its lacking in way to be a main for many folks but its close. Just the AI focus is sadly the best way for it to keep investments going, but are really not the top things I think Zed needs.
I use TP link Omada gear and its a been very good replacement to unifi. I use it both personally & manage a side gig venue’s network. I have lots of vlans & even run dante & ndi with no issues. Replaced a Unifi system it was so buggy. DHCP reserve IPs failed, spotty issues with artists phones & the mixer board to mix their in-ears etc. I’ve setup IPSec tunnel to AWS VPC even pretty easy.
Using a pi4 for last 4 years on poe running their management docker container. So solid! I’d recommend the pi over buying their hardware device mamager, its way slower.
For creativity, I wished I had the time to get really good with css. It really seems to have grown a lot. Using sveltekit, its really easy to get component scoped css